Alienation
The word alienation has a checkered history. Drawn originally from the vocabulary of the law, the word later appeared in connection with the treatment of persons who were, as ordinary people say, "not themselves." In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, property given away or sold was said to have been "alienated." This usage survives in the expression "inalienable rights"—rights that cannot be taken away, given away, or traded. The physician who treated the mentally ill was formerly called an "alienist." In contemporary usage, one speaks of being alienated from a former friend for whom one's affection has cooled or from a group in which one feels no longer comfortable. Alienation, in everyday English, refers to a specific loosening of ties to another person or a sense of estrangement from a group.
Philosophies of Alienation
In philosophy, by contrast, the word alienation has been used in a different sense to refer to estrangement from oneself, a profound disturbance within persons, their selves, and their lives. There is conflict or disconnection at the very heart of the alienated person's existence. Alienated lives do not form an intelligible whole; the alienated cannot tell a coherent story about their lives. Their lives lack meaning.
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